Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items in Sep

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New version of IXR

Announcing beta 1.5 of IXR, the Incutio XML-PRC Library for PHP. The library has undergone a complete restructuring and has a much cleaner design as a result. It also has a huge stack of new features, including:

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Pingback specification

Stuart has published the first draught of the PingBack specification, detailing how PingBack works and how it should be implemented. PingBack is brilliant—it just works. What could be simpler than just quietly telling someone’s blog that you’ve linked to them?

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Browser based rich text editing

Scott wants a rich text editor for Mozilla. What’s more, he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is and organise a fund drive to give developers a real incentive to do a good job.

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New IXR soon

I was up most of the night working on a new version of my XML-RPC library (newly named IXR, for Incutio XML-RPC). I should have it ready for release some time today—it implements most of the extensions I’ve linked to over the past few days and has a much cleaner object structure than the first version, while maintaining the ability to implement a server or client in as little code as possible.

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The css-discuss Wiki

The css-discuss Wiki has gone live—but only to list members. If you are on the list you will have received an email with instructions for accessing it. The Wiki should go live to non list members in a few days time.

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Top of the crops

Via Stuart: Top of the Crops 2002—the highlights of the UK Crop Circle season. Some of these are just awe inspiring.

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Fixing IE6

Jeffrey Zeldman on fixing A List Apart for IE6:

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Short guide to digital photography

Rob Tougher: My Guide To Digital Photography. A short but informative article on using Linux and Python to manage a collection of digital photographs.

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Even more XML-RPC

Yet more XML-RPC specs (thanks HarryF):

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Beta feeds from the Beeb

The BBC are running a set of beta RSS feeds for their news service, covering the front page, World news, UK news and Technology news. The feeds provide the article title and the short sub-heading as a description. More information courtesy of Matt Jones.

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Mime type list

A comprehensive list of different MIME media types (via Scripting News).

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The missing docs

Yet more XML-RPC goodness. The documentation for the suggested introspection methods throws a 404, but Google’s cache doesn’t:

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JellyBath

JellyBath (via Aquarionics). It turns your bath water in to Jelly. From the FAQ:

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Two Towers not available

Matt Drudge: The Two Towers is available on the Internet. Dorothea Salo: This is bogus. Aren’t rumours fun?

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Feedback

HarryF provided some excellent feedback on my library:

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And then there were eight

According to XML-RPC.com’s Implementations page there are now 8 PHP implementations of XML-RPC! Looks like I wasn’t the only person with an itch to scratch :)

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Useful XML-RPC links

Some useful XML-RPC links (before I forget):

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More on Pingback

More on PingBack. PingBack can be seen in effect on this blog and in this entry on kryogenix.org. If you wish to ping my blog you can do so using the following XML-RPC details:

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Pingback implemented

I’ve implemented PingBack on my blog. PingBack is a system for tracking who is linking to your blog in a controlled way, based on a post by Stuart a few months ago. The idea is that when you link to a PingBack enabled blog you (or your blogging tool) should send an XML-RPC “ping” to that blog’s PingBack server telling it where you have linked to and where you linked from. The PingBack server can then grab your page, check that the link is there and extract a title and short description from the blog. The system is an alternative to (and was inspired by) MoveableType’s TrackBack feature. Stuart and I are actively developing the idea and will be releasing code and documentation to help other people experiment with the system in the near future.

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Testing pingback

Testing pingback. This post is a lot more exciting than it looks ;)

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A new XML-RPC library for PHP

I spent most of yesterday messing around with XML-RPC. There are a variety of XMl-RPC libraries available for PHP but none of them felt right for what I needed. So, I’ve written my own.

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Yay for <links>

Aquarionics has joined the Mozilla <link> element party.

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Grabbing web pages with Perl and PHP

Web Basics with LWP (via Scott) is an excellent tutorial on Perl’s LWP, a powerful set of modules which make it easy to retrieve content from the web. I’ve been using the excellent Snoopy class for PHP for the same purpose, but I have to admit it isn’t half as comprehensive as LWP. I’ve also written my own simple function safeGet for more light weight tasks—it grabs and returns the contents of a web page but limits both the size of the page and the maximum time it can take to download it.

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PHP XML-RPC

I’ve been playing with XML-RPC and PHP today. I ended up using Keith Devin’s pleasantly straight forward library thanks to PHP’s built in (and completely undocumented) XML-RPC support conflicting with the function names used by Useful Inc’s partially object oriented library. I’ve been messing around with Stuart’s idea for a trackback alternative and things are looking pretty promising.

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Templating with Smarty

Zend have a short tutorial on PHP Templating with Smarty.

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Joel on platforms

Joel Spolsky: Platforms. Plenty of food for thought. Dave Winer responds with a pointer to his 1996 article The Perfect Parent which touches on the reasons Groove can’t count on making it as a platform.

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Font size bookmarklet

Scott Johnson (and others) has been waging war against Font Bitches, aka people who use fixed (pixel) fonts on their sites making the text unresizable in Internet Explorer. Here’s a new bookmarklet that can help alleviate the problem:

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A better trackback

A discussion on Aquarionics nails why TrackBack isn’t quite there yet (emphasis mine):

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